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AuthorTopic: MAJOR problem with SEO... help! (Read 4118 times)

OK so here's the situation. I started my site in 2009 and have used Coppermine for the entire time. Up until about 2011 or so we had AWESOME traffic, mostly from the gallery. It was like a dream come true and the site was very successful.

But then... starting in around 2012 the popularity of the site randomly started to plummet. Our traffic went down and down and down and now we're at a fraction of where we once were... and I mean a fraction

But out of sheer chance and random googling last night I worked out that the problem is that Google is refusing to crawl the gallery. It's crawling our forum just fine and seems to go to the main page of the gallery, but doesn't really seem to go in any further and crawl the well over 12,000 pictures that we have. Bing is doing it, but Google isn't, and as the vast majority of our traffic was coming solely from Google image search... what on Earth is going on?

I have checked the robots.txt files and I think they're fine.

I would appreciate so much if someone could help me with this. The site means a lot to me and it's had such a great run and a fantastic community. Fixing this surely relatively small problem will I think totally reverse the trend of our traffic numbers and we'll be back on the way up again! Exciting

The major problem with your gallery is that it's homepage is a malformed HTML document. Check it out at https://validator.w3.org by entering your gallery URL. Google is rejecting your site because of this problem.

<div style='top:47px;right:10px;position:absolute;color:white;font-size:12px;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;'>Gallery viewed <strong>16,455,760</strong> times with <strong>12,274</strong> files</div><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">The "Gallery viewed 16,455,760 times" info is being misplaced ahead of the !DOCTYPE tag. It doesn't seem to be a problem specifically with your theme as viewing your site with the water_drop theme displays the same problem.

I shall ask my web developer friend to take a peek and see what we can do about this. Ironic that I made that bit of text to show off the gallery popularity and then it tanked it!! Serves me right for boasting!

C'est la vie

Thank you very much for your time I really appreciate that. If this works I will happily start donating to Coppermine to say thank you.

Yes, I am. Google is quite particular (unlike Bing) and will reject poorly formed websites. And I think that is a good thing. Sites that take effort with the integrity of their their website code may be more likely to take effort with their website content.

Hm, true to a degree. But some people don't know much about SEO and it seems unfair to penalise them based on relatively arbitrary rules if their content is good.

Buuuut anyway... basically, right now, as long as Google is happy then I am happy!

So erm, is there an easy solution to this? Other than just removing the text... I mean, I could do that, and I will if I can't think of a way to put it there cleanly. If it's too much trouble to explain then it's OK and I can try to get a hand from a developer friend or work it out myself (but that might take a while as I'm not that great at this stuff yet! lol)

You definitely need to remove what you did so that your site is validly formatted HTML. And your web developer friend should easily be able to modify your theme to move the statistics at the bottom of your page to the top.

As a leg-up for your developer friend:Copy appropriate $template_ variables from include/themes.inc.php to your theme's theme.php file in order to reposition the location of the {STATISTICS} meta.

Have you connected your site to Google's Webmaster tool?If no, do so. If you've already done that, go to Crawl > URL parameters (google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-url-parameters), and check if they're indexing all of the gallery's urls. Mine, for some reason, was ignoring any url with pid, album and uid. Set them as a parameter that specifies the content of the page, and then select for every url with those parameters to be crawled by Google.That should help with indexing your gallery.